Today was a great day for the Open Data community. House Financial Services Committee re-introduced The Financial Transparency Act (FTA – H.R. 4476) today. The act comes with the message in its title: “To amend securities, commodities, and banking laws to make the information reported to financial regulatory agencies electronically searchable, to further enable the development of RegTech and Artificial Intelligence applications, to put the United States on a path towards building a comprehensive Standard Business Reporting program to ultimately harmonize and reduce the private sector’s regulatory compliance burden, while enhancing transparency and accountability and for other purposes.”
FTA will change the stage for the Open Data. It will also reinforce the need for the global unambiguous business identification – which will lead to the growth of interest in the LEI system.
On this occasion, Nick Hart, CEO of the Data Coalition, said:
“The Data Coalition strongly supports the bipartisan Financial Transparency Act, as re-introduced by Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Patrick McHenry (R-NC). The benefits of applying data standards to financial regulatory information as proposed by this legislation are clear: reduced compliance costs for businesses, better information for investors, and a more efficient regulatory oversight system that can effectively identify and address bad actors (…)”
I’m very happy because during my last Data Coalition US Congress “Fly-in” (February 2019) I met Patrick in person and, together with my Data Coalition colleagues, I had an opportunity to talk to him about the LEI system!
See also a great post by Nick Hart, Data Coalition CEO!
I find this as a significant step for the LEI system future. You can follow the progress of the legislation here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/4476.
